Chapter XVII: Letter 2 (1)

What has been leaves an imprint by means of which science sooner or later restores the past in its fundamental features. All that is lost is the particular atmosphere in which it has occurred. Apotheoses and calumnies, partialities and envies, all fade and are blown away. The faint track on the sand vanishes; the imprint which has force and persistence stamps itself on the rock and will be brought to light by the honest investigator.

Connections, degrees of kinship, testators and heirs, and their mutual rights, will all be revealed by the heraldry of science.

Only goddesses are born without predecessors, like Venus from the foam of the sea. Minerva, more intelligent, sprang from the ready head of Jupiter.

The Decembrists are our noble fathers, the Bazarovs our prodigal sons.

The heritage we received from the Decembrists was the awakened feeling of human dignity, the striving for independence, the hatred for slavery, the respect for Western Europe and for the Revolution, the faith in the possibility of an upheaval in Russia, the passionate desire to take part in it, the youth and freshness of our energies.

All that has been recast and moulded into new forms, but the foundations are untouched.

What has our generation bequeathed to the coming one? Nihilism.

Let us recall the position of affairs a little.

Somewhere about 1840 our life began to force its way out more vigorously, like steam from under a closed lid. A scarcely perceptible change passed all over Russia, the change by which the doctor discerns before he can fully account for it that there is a turn for the better, that the patient’s strength, though very weak, is reviving—there is a different _tone_. Somewhere inwardly in the moral invisible world there is the breath of a different air, more stimulating and healthier. Externally everything was deathlike under the ice of Nicholas’s government, but something was stirring in the mind and the conscience—a feeling of uneasiness, of dissatisfaction. The terror had grown weaker, men were sick of the twilight of the kingdom of darkness.

I saw that change with my own eyes, when I came back from exile, first in Moscow, afterwards in Petersburg. But I saw it in the literary and scientific circles.

Another man, whose Baltic antipathy for the Russian movement places him beyond the suspicion of partiality, described not so long ago how, returning at that period to the Petersburg aristocracy of the barracks after an absence of some years, he was puzzled at the decline of discipline. Aides-de-camp and colonels of the Guards were murmuring, were criticising the measures taken by the Government, and were displeased with Nicholas himself. He was so overwhelmed, distressed, and alarmed for the future of the Autocracy that in the tribulation of his spirit he felt when dining with the aide-de-camp B., almost in the presence of Dubbelt himself, that Nihilism had been born between the cheese and the dessert. He did not recognise the new-born spirit, but the new-born spirit was there. The machine wound up by Nicholas had begun to give way; he turned the screw the other way and every one felt it; some spoke, others kept silent and forbade speech, but all knew that things were really going wrong, that every one was oppressed, and that this oppression would bring no good to any one.

Laughter played its part too; laughter, never a good companion for any religion, and Autocracy is a religion. The vileness and degradation of the lower ranks of the officials had reached such a pitch that the Government abandoned them to the satirist. Nicholas, roaring with laughter in his box at the Mayor and his Derzhimorda,[80] helped the propaganda, never guessing that after the approval of the Most High the mockery would soon be promoted to the higher ranks.

It is difficult to apply Pisarev’s rubrics to this period without modification. Everything in life consists of _nuances_, hesitations, cross-currents, ebbing and flowing, and not of disconnected fragments. At what point did the men of will without knowledge cease to be and the men of knowledge without will begin?

Nature resolutely eludes classification, even classification by age. Lermontov was in years a contemporary of Byelinsky; he was at the university when we were, but he died in the hopeless pessimism of the Petchorin movement, against which the Slavophils and ourselves alike rose in opposition.

And by the way, I have mentioned the Slavophils. Where are Homyakov and his brethren to be put? What had they—will without knowledge, or knowledge without will? Yet the position they filled was no trifling one in the modern development of Russia, they left a deep imprint on the life of that time. Or in what levy of recruits shall we put Gogol, and by what standard? He had not knowledge, whether he had will I don’t know, I doubt it; but he had genius, and his influence was colossal.

And so, leaving aside the _lapides crescunt, planta crescunt et vivunt_ ... of Pisarev, let us pass on.

There were no secret societies, but the secret agreement of those who understood was immense. Circles consisting of men who had felt the bear’s claw of the Government on their own persons, more or less, kept a vigilant watch on their membership. Every action was impossible, even a word must be masked, but great was the power of speech, not only of the printed but even more of the spoken word, less easily detected by the police.

Two batteries were quickly moved forward. Journalism became propaganda. At the head of it, in the full flush of his youthful strength, stood Byelinsky. University lecture-rooms were transformed into pulpits, lectures into the preaching of humane culture; the personality of Granovsky, surrounded by young professors, became more and more prominent.

Then all at once another outburst of laughter. Strange laughter, terrible laughter, the laughter of hysteria, in which were mingled shame and pangs of conscience, and perhaps not the tears that follow laughter, but the laughter that follows tears. The absurd, monstrous, narrow world of _Dead Souls_ could not endure it; it sank and began to disappear. And the propaganda went on gathering strength ... always unchanged; tears and laughter and books and speech and Hegel[81] and history—all roused men to the consciousness of their position, to a feeling of horror for serfdom and for their own lack of rights, everything pointed them on to science and culture, to the purging of thought from all the litter of tradition, to the freeing of conscience and reason. That period saw the first dawn of Nihilism—that complete freedom from all established conceptions, from all the inherited obstructions and barriers which hinder the Western European mind from advancing in its historical fetters, from taking a step forward.

The silent work of the ’forties was cut short all at once. A time even blacker and more oppressive than the beginning of Nicholas’s reign followed upon the revolution of February. Byelinsky died before the beginning of the persecution. Granovsky envied him and wanted to leave Russia.

A dark night that lasted seven years fell upon Russia, and in it that intellectual outlook, that way of thinking that is called Nihilism, took shape, developed, and gained a firm hold on the Russian mind.

Nihilism (I repeat what I said lately in _The Bell_) is logic without structure, it is science without dogmas, it is the unconditional submission to experience and the resigned acceptance of all consequences, whatever they may be, if they follow from observation, or are required by reason. Nihilism does not transform something into nothing, but shows that nothing which has been taken for something is an optical illusion, and that every truth, however it contradicts our fantastic ideas, is more wholesome than they are, and is in any case what we are in duty bound to accept. Whether the name is appropriate or not does not matter. We are accustomed to it; it is accepted by friend and foe, it has become a police label, it has become a denunciation, an insult with some, a word of praise with others. Of course, if by Nihilism we are to understand destructive creativeness, that is, the turning of facts and thoughts into nothing, into barren scepticism, into haughty passivity, into the despair which leads to inaction, then true Nihilists are the last people to be included in the definition, and one of the greatest Nihilists will be Turgenev, who flung the first stone at them, and another will be perhaps his favourite philosopher, Schopenhauer. When Byelinsky, after listening to one of his friends, who explained at length that the _spirit_ attains self-consciousness in man, answered indignantly: ‘So, I am not conscious for my own sake, but for the spirit’s?... Why should I be taken advantage of? I had better not think at all; what do I care for its consciousness?...’ he was a Nihilist.

When Bakunin convicted the Berlin professors of being afraid of negation, and the Parisian revolutionaries of 1848 of conservatism, he was a Nihilist in the fullest sense.

All these discriminations and jealous reservations lead as a rule to nothing but artificial antagonism.

When the Petrashevsky group were sent to penal servitude for ‘trying to uproot all laws, human and divine, and to destroy the foundations of society,’ in the words of their sentence, the terms of which were stolen from the inquisitorial notes of Liprandi, they were Nihilists. Since then Nihilism has broadened out, has to some extent become doctrinaire, has absorbed a great deal from science, and has produced leaders of immense force and immense talent. All that is beyond dispute. But it has brought forth no new principles. Or if it has, where are they? I await an answer to this question from you, or perhaps from some one else, and then I will continue.

THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE AND SOCIALISM

_A Letter to J. Michelet_

This letter was first published at Nice in 1851, but only
circulated in Piedmont and Switzerland, as the French police
seized almost the whole edition in Marseilles.

Dear Sir,—You hold so high a position in the esteem of all thinking men, and every word which comes from your noble pen is received by the European democracy with such complete and deserved confidence, that I cannot keep silent in a matter that touches upon my deepest convictions. I cannot leave unanswered the description of the Russian people which you have included in your legend of Kosciuszko.[82]

This answer is necessary for another reason also. The time has come to show Europe that when they speak about Russia they are not speaking of something absent, defenceless, deaf and dumb.

We who have left Russia, only that free Russian speech may be heard at last in Europe, we are on the spot and deem it our duty to raise our voice when a man wielding an immense and deserved authority asserts that ‘Russia does not exist, Russians are not men, they are devoid of moral significance.’

If by this you mean official Russia, the parade-Tsardom, the Byzantine-German Government, then you are right. We agree beforehand with everything that you tell us; it is not for us to play the part of champion there. The Russian Government has so many agents in the press that there will never be a lack of eloquent apologies for its doings.

But not official society alone is dealt with in your work; you touch on a deeper question; you speak of the people itself.

Poor Russian people! There is no one to raise a voice in its defence! Judge whether I can in duty be silent.

The Russian people, my dear sir, is alive, strong, and not old; on the contrary, indeed, very young. Men do die even in youth, it does happen, but it is not the normal thing.

The past of the Russian people is obscure, its present is terrible, but it has claims on the future. It does not _believe_ in its present position; it has the temerity to expect the more from time, since it has received so little hitherto.

The most difficult period for the Russian people is drawing to its close. A terrible conflict awaits it; its enemies are making ready.

The great question, ‘to be or not to be,’ will soon be decided for Russia, but it is a sin to despair of success before the fight has begun.

The Russian question is assuming immense and fearful proportions; it is the object of interest and anxiety to all parties; but I think that too much attention is paid to Imperial Russia, to official Russia, and too little to the Russia of the people, to voiceless Russia.

Even looking at Russia solely from the point of view of its Government, do you not think it would be as well to become more closely acquainted with this inconvenient neighbour who makes himself felt throughout the whole of Europe, in one place with bayonets, in another with spies? The Russian Government extends its influence to the Mediterranean by its protection of the Ottoman Porte, to the Rhine by its protection of its German uncles and connections, to the Atlantic by its protection of _order_ in France.

It would not be amiss, I maintain, to appraise at its true value this universal protector, to inquire whether this strange realm is destined to play no other part than the repulsive one assumed by the Petersburg Government, the part of a barrier continually thrown up on the path of human progress.

Europe is approaching a terrible cataclysm. The mediaeval world is falling into ruins. The feudal world is drawing to a close. Political and religious revolutions are flagging under the burden of their impotence; they have accomplished great things, but have not carried out their tasks. They have destroyed faith in the Throne and the Altar, but have not established freedom; they have kindled in men’s hearts desires which they are incapable of satisfying. Parliamentarianism, Protestantism, are only stop-gaps, temporary havens, weak bulwarks against death and resurrection. Their day is over. Since 1849 it has been grasped that petrified Roman law, subtle casuistry, thin philosophic deism, and barren religious rationalism are all equally powerless to hold back the workings of destiny.

The storm is approaching, it is impossible to avert it. Revolutionaries and reactionaries are at one about that. All men’s minds are perturbed; the oppressive, vital question lies heavy on the hearts of all. With growing uneasiness all men ask themselves whether there is still strength for recovery in old Europe, that decrepit Proteus, that decaying organism. The answer to that question is awaited with horror, and the suspense is terrible.

Indeed, it is a fearful question! Will old Europe have the power to infuse new blood into its veins and fling itself into the boundless future to which it is drawn by an invincible force, to which it is being borne headlong, the path to which is perhaps over the ruins of its ancestral home, over the fragments of past civilisations, over the trampled riches of modern culture?

On both sides the full gravity of the moment has been understood; Europe is plunged in dim, stifling gloom, on the eve of the momentous conflict. It is not life, but an oppressive, agitating suspense. There is no regard for law, no justice, no personal freedom even; everywhere the sway of the secular inquisition is supreme; instead of order upheld by law, there is a state of siege, all are governed by a single feeling—fear, and there is plenty of it. Every question is thrown into the background before the all-devouring interests of the reaction. Governments, apparently most hostile, are united into a single world-wide police. The Russian Emperor, without concealing his hatred for the French, rewards the Prefect of the Parisian police; the King of Naples bestows a decoration on the President of the Republic. The Prussian King, donning the Russian uniform, hastens to Warsaw to embrace his foe, the Emperor of Austria, in the gracious presence of Nicholas; while the latter, the schismatic of the one Church of salvation, proffers his aid to the Pope of Rome. In the midst of these Saturnalia, in the midst of this Sabbath of the reaction, nothing is left to safeguard freedom from the caprices of tyranny. Even the guarantees which exist in undeveloped societies, in China, in Persia, are no longer respected in the capitals of the so-called civilised world.

One can hardly believe one’s eyes. Can this be the Europe which once we knew and loved?

Indeed, if it were not for free and haughty England, ‘that jewel set in a silver sea,’ as Shakespeare calls it, if Switzerland were, like Peter, in fear of Caesar, to renounce its principles, if Piedmont, that branch still left of Italy, that last refuge of freedom, which has been hunted beyond the Alps, and cannot cross the Apennines, were led astray by the example of her neighbours, if those three countries were infected by the spirit of death that breathes from Paris and Vienna, it might be thought that the Conservatives had succeeded already in bringing the old world to its final dissolution, that the days of barbarism had already returned in France and Germany.

In the midst of this chaos, in the midst of these pangs of death and agonies of birth, in the midst of a world falling into dust about the cradle of the future, men’s eyes involuntarily turn to the East.

There a hostile, menacing empire is seen standing out behind the mists, like a dark mountain; at times it seems as though it is falling upon Europe like an avalanche, that like an impatient heir it is ready to hasten her tardy death.

This empire, absolutely unknown two hundred years ago, has suddenly made its appearance, and with no right to do so, with no invitation, has loudly and bluntly raised its voice in the council of European Powers, demanding a share in the booty, won without its assistance.

No one has dared to oppose its pretensions to interfere in the affairs of Europe. Charles XII. tried to do so, but his sword, till then invincible, was broken; Frederick II. attempted to resist the claims of the Petersburg Court; Königsberg and Berlin became the prey of the foe from the North. Napoleon, with half a million men, penetrated to the very heart of the giant, and stole away alone in the first peasant sledge he came upon. Europe gazed with astonishment at Napoleon’s flight, at the crowds of Cossacks racing in pursuit of him, at the Russian troops marching to Paris, and giving the Germans their national independence by way of alms on the road. Since then Russia has lain like a vampire over the fate of Europe, watching the mistakes of rulers and peoples. Yesterday she almost crushed Austria, assisting her against Hungary; to-morrow she will proclaim Brandenburg a Russian province to appease the Prussian King.

Is it credible that on the very eve of conflict nothing is known of this combatant? Yet he stands already menacing, fully armed, prepared to cross the frontier at the first summons of reaction. And meanwhile men scarcely know his weapons, or the colour of his flag, and are satisfied with his official speeches and the vague, incongruous tales that are told of him.

Some tell us only of the unlimited power of the Tsar, of the capricious tyranny of his Government, of the slavish spirit of his subjects; others assert, on the contrary, that the Imperialism of Petersburg has nothing in common with the people, that this people, crushed under the twofold despotism of the Government and the landowners, bears the yoke, but is not resigned to it, that it is not crushed, but only unfortunate, and at the same time declare that it is this very people which gives unity and power to the colossal Tsardom that crushes it. Some add that the Russian people is a _contemptible rabble of drunkards and knaves_; others maintain that Russia is inhabited by a competent and richly gifted race. It seems to me that there is something tragic in the senile heedlessness with which the old world mixes up the different accounts it hears of its antagonist. In this confusion of contradictory opinions there is apparent so much senseless repetition, such distressing superficiality, such petrified prejudice, that we are involuntarily moved to a comparison with the days of the fall of Rome.

Then, too, on the eve of catastrophe, on the eve of the victory of the barbarians, men loudly proclaimed the eternity of Rome, the impotent madness of the Nazarenes, and the insignificance of the movement that was arising in the barbarian world.

You have performed a great service: you first in France have spoken of the Russian people, you have, unawares, touched on the very heart, the very source of life. The truth would have been revealed to your eyes at once, if you had not, in a moment of anger, pulled back your outstretched hand, if you had not turned away from the source because its waters were not clear.

I read your bitter words with deep distress, with melancholy, with anguish in my heart. I confess I looked in vain in them for the historian, the philosopher, and, above all, the tender-hearted man whom we all know and love. I hasten to explain, I fully understood the cause of your indignation; sympathy for unhappy Poland prompted your words. We, too, deeply cherish this feeling for our Polish brothers, and in us the feeling is not merely one of pity, but of shame, and pangs of conscience. Love for Poland! We all love her, but is it necessary to combine with that feeling hatred for another people as unhappy, a people forced to aid with its fettered hands the misdeeds of its savage Government? Let us be magnanimous, let us not forget that before our eyes the nation decked with all the trophies of recent revolution has consented to the establishment of _order_ in Rome like that in Warsaw. And to-day ... look yourself what is going on about you ... yet we do not say that the French _have ceased to be men_.

It is time to forget this unhappy conflict between brothers. Among us there is no conqueror. Poland and Russia are crushed by a common foe. Even the victims and the martyrs turn their backs upon the past, which is equally sorrowful for them and for us. I, like you, appeal to your friend the great poet, Mickiewicz.

Do not say of the Polish bard’s opinions that they are ‘due to mercifulness, a sacred delusion.’ No; they are the fruits of long and conscientious thought and a profound understanding of the destinies of the Slav world. The forgiveness of enemies is a glorious achievement, but there is an achievement still more glorious, more humane; that is, the understanding of enemies, for understanding is at once forgiveness, justification, reconciliation.

The Slav world is striving towards unity; that tendency became apparent immediately after the Napoleonic period. The idea of a Slavonic federation had already taken shape in the revolutionary plans of Pestel and Muravyov. Many Poles had a hand in the Russian conspiracy of December 1825.

When the Revolution of 1830 broke out in Warsaw, the Russian people displayed not the slightest animosity against the disobedient subjects of their Tsar. The young were in complete sympathy with the Poles. I remember with what impatience we awaited tidings from Warsaw; we cried like children at the news of the memorial services held in the capital of Poland for our Petersburg martyrs. Sympathy for the Poles exposed us to the risk of cruel punishments, we were forced to conceal it in our hearts and to be silent.

It may well be that during the war of 1830 a feeling of exclusive nationalism and quite intelligible hostility prevailed in Poland. But since those days the influence of Mickiewicz, the historical and philological works of many Slav scholars, a closer knowledge of other European nations, purchased at the bitter price of exile, has given a very different turn to Polish thought. The Poles have come to feel that the battle is not between the Russian people and themselves; they have learned that for the future the only way they can fight is _for their and our freedom_, the words inscribed on their revolutionary banner.

Konarski, who was tortured and shot by Nicholas at Vilna, called upon Russians and Poles without distinction of race to rise in revolt. Russia showed her gratitude by one of those almost unknown tragedies with which every heroic action ends amongst us under the military heel of our German rulers.

Korovazev, an army officer, resolved to save Konarski. The day when he would be on duty was approaching, everything was in readiness for the escape, when the treachery of one of the Polish martyr’s comrades brought his plans to ruin. The young man was arrested and sent to Siberia, and nothing has been heard of him since.

I spent five years in exile in the remote provinces of the Empire. There I met many Polish exiles. Almost in every district town there is either a whole group, or at least one of the luckless champions of independence. I would gladly appeal to their evidence; certainly they cannot complain of lack of sympathy on the part of the people around them. Of course, I am not speaking here of the police or members of the higher military hierarchy. They are nowhere conspicuous for their love of freedom, and least of all in Russia. I might appeal to the Polish students exiled every year to Russian universities to remove them from the influences of their native land; let them describe how they were received by their Russian comrades. They used to part from us with tears in their eyes.

You remember that when in 1847 the Polish emigrants in Paris celebrated the anniversary of their revolution, a Russian mounted their platform to beg for their friendship, and forgiveness for the past. That was our unhappy friend Bakunin.... But not to quote my fellow-countrymen, I will pick out one of those who are reckoned our enemies, a man whom you have yourself mentioned in your legend of Kosciuszko. For evidence on this subject I will refer you to one of the veterans of the Polish democracy, Bernacki, one of the ministers of revolutionary Poland. I boldly appeal to him, though long years of grief might well have embittered him against everything Russian. I am convinced that he will confirm all that I have said.

The solidarity binding Russia and Poland to each other and to the whole Slav world cannot be denied; it is obvious. What is more, there is no future for the Slav world apart from Russia; without Russia it will not develop, it will fall to pieces and be swallowed up by the German element; it will become Austrian and lose its independence. But in our opinion that is not its fate, not the end for which it is destined.

Following the gradual development of your idea, I must confess that I cannot agree with your view of Europe as a single individual in which every nationality plays the part of an essential organ.

It seems to me that all the German-Latin nationalities are necessary in the European world, because they exist in it, in consequence of some necessity. Aristotle long ago drew a distinction between pre-existent necessity and the necessity involved in the sequence of events. Nature is subject to the necessity of the accomplished fact, but her hesitation between various possibilities is very marked. On the same principle the Slav world can claim its right to unity, especially as it is made up of one race.

Centralisation is alien to the Slav spirit—federation is far more natural to it. Only when grouped in a league of free and independent peoples will the Slav world at last enter upon its genuine historical existence. Its past can only be regarded as a period of growth, of preparation, of purification. The political forms in which the Slavs have lived in the past have not been in harmony with their national tendency, a tendency vague and instinctive if you like, but by that very fact betraying an extraordinary vitality and promising much in the future. The Slavs have until now displayed in every phase of their history a strange unconcern—indeed, a marvellous receptivity. Thus Russia passed from paganism to Christianity without a shock, without a revolt, simply in obedience to the Grand Duke Vladimir, and in imitation of Kiev. Without regret they flung their old idols into the Volhov and accepted the new god as a new idol.

Eight hundred years later, part of Russia in precisely the same way accepted a civilisation imported from abroad.

The Slav world is like a woman who has never loved, and for that very reason apparently takes no interest in what is going on about her. She is a stranger to all, unwanted everywhere, but there is no answering for the future; she is still young, and already a strange yearning has taken possession of her heart and sets it beating faster.

As for the richness of the national spirit, we need only point to the Poles, the one Slavonic people which has been at once free and powerful.

The Slav world is not in reality made up of nationalities so different in kind. Under the outer crust of chivalrous Liberal and Catholic Poland, and of imperial enslaved Byzantine Russia, under the democratic rule of the Serb Voyevod, under the bureaucratic yoke with which Austria oppresses Illyria, Dalmatia, and the Banat, under the patriarchal authority of the Osmanlis and under the blessing of the Archbishop of Montenegro, live nations physiologically and ethnographically identical.

The greater number of these Slav peoples have never been enslaved by conquest. The dependence in which they are so often found has for the most part consisted only in the recognition of a foreign potentate and the payment of tribute. Such, for instance, was the character of the Mongol power in Russia. Thus the Slavs have through long centuries preserved their nationality, their character, their language.

Have we not therefore the right to look upon Russia as the centre of the crystallisation, the centre towards which the Slav world in its striving toward unity is gravitating, especially as Russia is so far the only nation of the great race organised into a powerful and independent state?

The answer to this question would be perfectly clear if the Petersburg Government had the faintest inkling of its national destiny, if that dull-witted, deadly despotism could make terms with any humane idea. But in the present position of affairs, what honest man will bring himself to suggest to the Western Slavs their union with an empire which is perpetually in a state of siege, an empire in which the sceptre has been turned into a bludgeon that beats men to death?

The Imperial Pan-Slavism, eulogised from time to time by men who have been suborned, or who have lost their bearings, has, of course, nothing in common with a union resting on the foundations of freedom.

At this point we are inevitably brought by logic to a question of primary importance. Assuming that the Slav world can hope in the future for a fuller development, are we not forced to enquire which of the elements that have found expression in its undeveloped state gives it grounds for such a hope? If the Slavs believe that their time has come, this element must be in harmony with the revolutionary idea in Europe.

You indicated that element, you touched upon it, but it escaped you, because a generous sentiment of sympathy for Poland drew your attention away from it.

You say that ‘the fundamental basis of the life of the Russian people is _communism_,’ you maintain that ‘their strength lies in their agrarian law, in the perpetual re-division of the land.’

What a terrible _Mene Tekel_ has dropped from your lips!... Communism—the fundamental basis! Strength resting on re-division of the land! And you were not alarmed at your own words?

Ought we not here to pause, to take thought, to look more deeply into the question, and not to leave it before making certain whether it is a dream or truth?

Is there in the nineteenth century an interest of any gravity which does not involve the question of communism, the question of the re-division of the land?

Carried away by your indignation you go on: ‘They (the Russians) are without any true sign of humanity, of moral sensibility, of the sense of good and evil. Truth and justice have for them no meaning; if you speak of these things—they are mute, they smile and know not what the words signify.’ Who may those Russians be to whom you have spoken? What conceptions of _truth and justice_ appeared beyond their comprehension? This is not a superfluous question. In our profoundly revolutionary epoch the words ‘truth and justice’ have lost all absolute meaning identical for all men.

The _truth and justice_ of old Europe are falsehood and injustice to the Europe which is being born. Nations are products of Nature, history is the progressive continuation of animal development. If we apply our moral standards to Nature, we shall not get very far. She cares nought for our blame or our praise. Our verdicts and the Montyon prizes[83] for virtue do not exist for her. The ethical categories created by our individual caprice are not applicable to her. It seems to me that a nation cannot be called either bad or good. The life of a people is always true to its character and cannot be false. Nature produces only what is practicable under given conditions: all that exists is drawn onwards by her generative ferment, her insatiable thirst for creation, that thirst common to all things living.

There are peoples living a prehistoric life, others living a life outside history; but once they move into the broad stream of history, one and indivisible, they belong to _humanity_, and, on the other hand, all the past of humanity belongs to them. In history—that is, in the life of the active and progressive part of humanity—the aristocracy of facial angle, of complexion, and other distinctions is gradually effaced. That which has not become human cannot come into history: so no nation which has become part of history can be reckoned a herd of beasts, just as there is no nation which deserves to be called an assembly of the elect.

There is no man bold enough, or ungrateful enough, to deny the importance of France in the destinies of the European world; but you must allow me the frank confession that I cannot share your view that the sympathetic interest of France is the _sine qua non_ of historical progress in the future.

Nature never stakes all her fortune on one card. Rome, the Eternal City, which had no less right to the hegemony of the world, tottered, fell into ruins, vanished, and pitiless humanity strode forward over its grave.

On the other hand, unless one looks on Nature as madness incarnate, it would be hard to see nothing but an outcast race, nothing but a vast deception, nothing but a casual rabble, human only through their vices, in a people that has grown and multiplied during ten centuries, that has obstinately preserved its nationality, that has formed itself into an immense empire, and has intervened in history far more perhaps than it should have done.

And such a view is the more difficult to accept since this people, even judging from the words of its enemies, is far from being in a stagnant condition. It is not a race that has attained social forms approximately corresponding to its desires and has sunk into slumber in them, like the Chinese; still less, a people that has outlived its prime and is withering in senile impotence, like the people of India. On the contrary, Russia is a quite new State—an unfinished building in which everything smells of fresh plaster, in which everything is at work and being worked out, in which nothing has yet attained its object, in which everything is changing, often for the worse, but anyway changing. In brief, this is the people whose fundamental principle, to quote your opinion, is communism, and whose strength lies in the re-division of land....

With what crime, after all, do you reproach the Russian people? What is the essential point of your accusation?

‘The Russian,’ you say, ‘is a liar and a thief; he is perpetually stealing, he is perpetually lying, and quite innocently—it is in his nature.’

I will not stop to call attention to the sweeping character of your verdict, but will ask you a simple question: who is it that the Russian deceives, from whom does he steal? Who—if not the landowner, the Government official, the steward, the police officer, in fact the sworn foes of the peasant, whom he looks upon as heathens, as traitors, as half Germans? Deprived of every possible means of defence, the peasant resorts to cunning in dealing with his torturers, he deceives them, and he is perfectly right in doing so.

Cunning, my dear sir, is, in the words of the great thinker,[84] the irony of brute force.

Through his aversion for private property in land, so correctly noted by you, through his heedless and indolent temperament, the Russian peasant has gradually and imperceptibly been caught in the snares of the German bureaucracy and of the landowners’ power. He has submitted to this humiliating disaster with the resignation of a martyr, but he has not believed in the rights of the landowner, nor the justice of the law-courts, nor the legality of the acts of the authorities. For nearly two hundred years the peasant’s existence has been a dumb, passive opposition to the existing order of things. He submits to coercion, he endures, but he takes no part in anything that goes on outside the village commune.

The name of the Tsar still stirs a superstitious sentiment in the people; it is not to the Tsar Nicholas that the peasant does homage, but to the abstract idea, the myth; in the popular imagination the Tsar stands for a menacing avenger, an incarnation of Justice, an earthly providence.

Besides the Tsar, only the clergy could possibly have an influence on orthodox Russia. They alone represent old Russia in governing spheres; the clergy do not shave their beards, and by that fact have remained on the side of the people. The peasantry listen with confidence to the monks. But the monks and the higher clergy, occupied exclusively with life beyond the grave, care little for the people. The village priests have lost all influence through their greed, their drunkenness, and their intimate relations with the police. In their case, too, the peasants respect the idea but not the person.

As for the dissenters, they hate both person and idea, both priest and Tsar.

Apart from the Tsar and the clergy every element of government and society is utterly alien, essentially antagonistic to the people. The peasant finds himself in the literal sense of the word an outlaw. The law-court is no protector for him, and his share in the existing order of things is entirely confined to the twofold tribute that lies heavy upon him and is paid in his toil and his blood. Rejected by all, he instinctively understands that the whole system is ordered not for his benefit, but to his detriment, and that the aim of the Government and the landowners is to wring out of him as much labour, as much money, as many recruits as possible. As he understands this and is gifted with a supple and resourceful intelligence, he deceives them on all sides and in everything. It could not be otherwise; if he spoke the truth he would by so doing be acknowledging their authority over him; if he did not rob them (observe that to conceal part of the produce of his own labour is considered theft in a peasant) he would thereby be recognising the lawfulness of their demands, the rights of the landowners and the justice of the law-courts.

To understand the Russian peasant’s position fully, you should see him in the law-courts; you must see his hopeless face, his frightened watchful eyes, to understand that he is a prisoner of war before the court-martial, a traveller facing a gang of brigands. From the first glance it is clear that the victim has not the slightest trust in the hostile, pitiless, insatiable robbers who are questioning him, tormenting him and fleecing him. He knows that if he has money he will be acquitted; if not, he will be found guilty.

The Russian people speak their own old language, the judges and the attorneys write in a new bureaucratic language, hideous and barely intelligible; they fill whole folios with ungrammatical jargon, and gabble off this mummery to the peasant. He may understand it if he can and find his way out of the muddle if he knows how. The peasant knows what this performance means, and maintains a cautious demeanour. He does not say one word too much, he conceals his uneasiness and stands silent, pretending to be a fool.

The peasant who has been acquitted by the court trudges home, no more elated than if he had been condemned. In either case the decision seems to him the result of capricious tyranny or chance.

In the same way, when he is summoned as a witness he stubbornly professes to know nothing, even in face of incontestable fact. Being found guilty by a law-court does not disgrace a man in the eyes of the Russian peasant. Exiles and convicts go by the name of _unfortunates_ with him.

The life of the Russian peasantry has hitherto been confined to the commune. It is only in relation to the commune and its members that the peasant recognises that he has rights and duties. Outside the commune everything seems to him based upon violence. What is fatal is his submitting to that violence, and not his refusing in his own way to recognise it and his trying to protect himself by guile. Lying before a judge set over him by unlawful authority is far more straightforward than a hypocritical show of respect for a jury tampered with by a corrupt prefect. The peasant respects only those institutions which reflect his innate conception of law and right.

There is a fact which no one who has been in close contact with the Russian peasantry can doubt. The peasants rarely cheat each other. An almost boundless good faith prevails among them; they know nothing of contracts and written agreements.

The problems connected with the measurement of their fields are often inevitably complicated, owing to the perpetual re-division of land, in accordance with the number of taxpayers in the family; yet the difficulties are got over without complaint or resort to the law-courts. The landowners and the Government eagerly seek an opportunity of interference, but that opportunity is not given them. Petty disputes are submitted to the judgment of the elders or of the commune, and the decision is unconditionally accepted by all. It is just the same thing in the _artels_. The _artels_ are often made up of several hundred workmen, who form a union for a definite period—for instance, for a year. At the expiration of the year the workmen divide their wages by common agreement, in accordance with the work done by each. The police never have the satisfaction of meddling in their accounts. Almost always the _artel_ makes itself responsible for every one of its members.

The bonds between the peasants of the commune are even closer when they are not orthodox but dissenters. From time to time the Government organises a savage raid on some dissenting village. Peasants are clapped into prison and sent into exile, and it is all done with no sort of plan, no consistency, without rhyme or reason, solely to satisfy the clamour of the clergy and give the police something to do. The character of the Russian peasants, the solidarity existing among them, is displayed again during these hunts after heretics. At such times it is worth seeing how they succeed in deceiving the police, in saving their comrades and concealing their holy books and vessels, how they endure the most awful tortures without uttering a word. I challenge any one to bring forward a single case in which a dissenting commune has been betrayed by a peasant, even by an orthodox one.

The peculiarity of the Russian character makes police enquiries excessively difficult. One can but heartily rejoice at the fact. The Russian peasant has no morality except what naturally, instinctively flows from his communism; this morality is deeply rooted in the people; the little they know of the Gospel supports it; the flagrant injustice of the landowner binds the peasant still more closely to his principles and to the communal system.[85]

The commune has saved the Russian people from Mongol barbarism and Imperial civilisation, from the Europeanised landlords and from the German bureaucracy. The communal system, though it has suffered violent shocks, has stood firm against the interference of the authorities; it has successfully survived _up to the development of socialism in Europe_. This circumstance is of infinite consequence for Russia.

The Russian Autocracy is entering upon a new phase. Having grown out of an anti-national revolution,[86] it has accomplished its destined task. It has created an immense empire, a formidable army, a centralised government. Without real roots, without tradition, it was doomed to ineffectiveness; it is true that it undertook a new task—to bring Western civilisation into Russia; and it was to some extent successful in doing that while it still played the part of an enlightened government.

That part it has now abandoned.

The Government, which severed itself from the people in the name of civilisation, has lost no time in cutting itself off from culture in the name of autocracy.

It renounced civilisation as soon as the tri-coloured phantom of liberalism began to be visible through its tendencies; it tried to turn to nationalism, to the people. That was impossible—the people and the Government had nothing in common; the former had grown away from the latter, while the Government discerned deep in the masses a new phantom, the still more terrible phantom of the Red Cock.[87] Of course, liberalism was less dangerous than the new Pugatchovism, but the terror and dislike of new ideas had grown so strong that the Government was no longer capable of making its peace with civilisation.

Since then the sole aim of Tsarism has been Tsarism. It rules in order to rule, its immense powers are employed for their mutual destruction, for the preservation of an artificial peace. But autocracy for the sake of autocracy in the end becomes impossible; it is too absurd, too barren.

It has felt this and has begun to look for work to do in Europe. The activity of Russian diplomacy is inexhaustible; notes, threats, promises, councils are scattered on all sides, its spies and agents scurry to and fro in all directions.

The Russian Emperor regards himself as the natural protector of the German Princes; he meddles in all the petty intrigues of the petty German courts; he settles all their disputes, scolding one, rewarding another with the hand of a Grand Duchess. But this is not a sufficient outlet for his energy. He undertakes the duty of chief gendarme of the universe; he is the mainstay of every reaction, every persecution. He plays the part of the representative of the monarchical principle in Europe, assumes the airs and graces of the aristocracy, as though he were a Bourbon, or a Plantagenet, as though his courtiers were Gloucesters or Montmorencys.

Unhappily there is nothing in common between feudal monarchism with its definite basis, its past, and its social and religious ideas, and the Napoleonic despotism of the Petersburg Tsar with no moral principle behind it, nothing but a deplorable historic necessity, a transitory usefulness.

And the Winter Palace, like a mountain top toward the end of autumn, is more and more thickly covered with snow and ice. The vital sap artificially raised to these governmental heights is gradually being frozen; nothing is left but mere material power, and the hardness of the rock which still resists the onslaught of the waves of revolution.

Nicholas, surrounded by his generals, his ministers, and his bureaucrats, tries to forget his isolation, but grows hour by hour gloomier, more morose, more uneasy. He sees that he is not loved; he discerns the deadly silence that reigns about him through the distant murmur of the far-away tempest, which seems to be coming nearer. The Tsar seeks to forget, he proclaims aloud that his aim is the aggrandisement of the Imperial power.

That avowal is nothing new; for the last twenty years he has unwearyingly, unrestingly laboured for that sole object; for the sake of it he has spared neither the tears nor the blood of his subjects.

He has succeeded in everything: he has crushed Polish nationalism; in Russia he has suppressed liberalism.

What more does he want, indeed? Why is he so gloomy?

The Emperor feels that Poland is not yet dead. In place of the liberalism which he has persecuted with a savagery quite superfluous, for that exotic flower cannot take root in Russian soil, another movement menacing as a storm-cloud is arising.

The peasantry is beginning to murmur under the yoke of the landowners; local insurrections are continually breaking out; you yourself quote a terrible instance of this.

The party of progress demands the emancipation of the peasants; it is ready to sacrifice its own privileges. The Tsar hesitates and holds it back; he desires emancipation and puts hindrances in its way. He sees that freeing the peasants involves freeing the land; that this in its turn is the beginning of a social revolution, the proclamation of rural communism. To escape the question of emancipation is impossible, to defer its solution to the next reign is, of course, easier, but it is a cowardly resource, and only amounts to the respite of a few hours wasted at a wretched posting-station in waiting for horses....

From all this you see how fortunate it is for Russia that the village commune has not perished, that personal ownership has not split up the property of the commune; how fortunate it is for the Russian people that it has remained outside all political movements, outside European civilisation, which would undoubtedly have undermined the commune, and which has to-day reached in socialism the negation of itself.

Europe, as I have said in another place, has not solved the problem of the rival claims of the individual and the State, but has set herself the task of solving it. Russia has not found the solution either. It is in this problem that our equality begins.

At the first step towards the social revolution Europe is confronted with the people which presents it with a system, half-savage and unorganised, but still a system, that of perpetual re-division of land among its cultivators. And observe that this great example is given us not by educated Russia, but by the people itself, by its actual life. We Russians who have passed through European civilisation are no more than a means, a leaven, mediators between the Russian people and revolutionary Europe. The man of the future in Russia is the peasant, just as in France it is the workman.

But, if this is so, have not the Russian peasantry some claim on your indulgence, sir?

Poor peasant! Every possible injustice is hurled at him: the Emperor oppresses him with levies of recruits, the landowner steals his labour, the official takes his last rouble. The peasant endures in silence but does not despair, he still has the commune. If a member is torn from it, the commune draws its ranks closer. One would have thought the peasant’s fate deserved compassion, yet it touches no one. Instead of defending, men upbraid him.

You do not leave him even the last refuge, in which he still feels himself a man, in which he loves and is not afraid; you say: ‘His commune is not a commune, his family is not a family, his wife is not a wife; before she is his, she is the property of the landowner; his children are not his children—who knows who is their father?’

So you expose this luckless people not to scientific analysis but to the contempt of other nations, who receive your legends with confidence.

I regard it as a duty to say a few words on this subject.

Family life among all the Slavs is very highly developed; it may be the one conservative element of their character, the point at which their destructive criticism stops.

The peasants are very reluctant to split up the family; not uncommonly three or four generations go on living under one roof around the grandfather, who enjoys a patriarchal authority. The woman, commonly oppressed, as is always the case in the agricultural class, is treated with respect and consideration when she is the widow of the eldest son.

Not uncommonly the whole family is ruled by a grey-haired grandmother.... Can it be said that the family does not exist in Russia?

Let us pass to the landowner’s relation to the family of his serf. For the sake of clearness, we will distinguish the rule from its abuses, what is lawful from what is criminal.

_Jus primae noctis_ has never existed in Russia.